World Warden, page 27
“All right. We need to make a plan,” Tristan said, adopting the authoritative tone that reminded Elias of Tristan wearing his Colony Patrol uniform, bossing people around.
Elias smiled. In a crisis, he definitely wanted Tristan on his team. “I’m all ears.”
Tristan patted the surface underneath him. “First, this thing. The ocean maw.”
“What about it?”
“Is it going to sink, do you think?”
“I don’t know,” Elias admitted. “But I don’t think so. I think this is an organism that evolved to resemble a bunch of floating kelp, camouflaging itself so it’s able to trap anything that climbs onto it. Maybe it normally feeds on ocean birds or something like that.”
“But now it’s dead.”
“Yeah, but I don’t think that makes any difference. This is a plant, not an animal. At least I’m ninety percent sure.”
“Okay?” Tristan said, indicating he did not follow.
“That means that its structural integrity will probably remain unchanged for a while. Even if it has died, like this one. I’m not totally convinced of this, but considering the fact that we spent all night on it, with the weight of two guys and three wurl, I don’t think it’s going to sink right away. If it is a kind of plant, the creature probably does not have any means of locomotion, or a way to swim on its own through the water. My theory is that it simply floats wherever the currents take it, and the shape of its body is optimized for that.” He brought up his link. He had long since lost the GPS signal that connected him to Portree, but the link was still able to track distance covered in approximate numbers. “According to my link, we have traveled about fifty kilometers since last night. The creature did not move on its own, which means that we are being carried by the current, floating along.”
“Okay. Good. That takes care of one problem, then.”
“Yeah. At least we don’t have to ride the wurl—yet.”
“Which leads me to the second problem,” Tristan said. “Navigation.”
“The platform is too big,” Elias told Tristan. “I don’t think the wurl will be able to tow it the way they did with our boat. Besides, we don’t even have the ropes anymore. They would have to push it somehow, and I’m concerned that if they do, they might simply crush sections of the maw, and then we will sink.”
Tristan nodded. “Yeah. I was thinking more or less the same thing.”
Elias pointed at their worryingly small pile of supplies. “This means that this, right here, is most of what we have. The wurl will probably share some of what they kill with us, but you can’t eat it.”
“I can try,” Tristan said.
“Yeah, but we need to be prepared. If you can’t digest it, that means you should eat most of the food here, which isn’t much.”
It was not an understatement. Most of their supplies had been lost with the boat. They had some dried food in their sealed metallic envelopes, about two liters of water, a change of clothes, and some fire-starting equipment that had been soaked and was therefore useless. Critically, however, they did have one other item—the water condenser.
“I’m not concerned about the food, not that much,” Tristan said, nodding at the condenser.
“Water,” Elias said, agreeing with him. “I know.”
“We need to look at it like it is, Elias. Okay?”
Elias looked into Tristan’s eyes and nodded. “Okay.”
“Here’s the situation. We’re stranded. In the middle of the ocean. We have no real way of knowing where we are aside from the maps on our links, but they can’t track our position anymore, so where we are is anybody’s guess. We have a little bit of food, even less water. With what we have now, we won’t make it. Not even if we each ride a wurl and leave everything else behind.”
Elias gulped. Hearing it said out loud made the situation scarier.
“We have to make a choice: go back or continue. If we go back, there’s no guarantee we will make it, even if we keep going west until we reach land. I’m not even sure the wurl would be able to carry us that far, or whether they would even want to. After all, they are trying to save their future queen, just like we are trying to save Oscar… but if we keep going forward, it’s almost certain we won’t survive.”
“I know,” Elias said quietly. Images flashed through his mind. Oscar screaming as Dresde took him away. Sizzra’s reminder that his promise would bind him forever. “But I have to try.”
Tristan crossed his arms over his chest. Then he smiled. “I thought you’d say that. In that case, let’s see what we can do.”
They spent the better part of that morning organizing their supplies and setting up the condenser right away. The wurl came back a couple of hours later, and Elias saw that Narev held a spike-covered sphere in his jaws when he surfaced. The wurl heaved himself onto the platform, making it wobble, and trotted over to Elias, radiating contentment. Vanor and Siv had not brought anything to share, but they were also projecting the satisfaction that usually followed a successful hunt. The two of them settled on the opposite edge of the platform and relaxed, sunning themselves.
“What’s this, Narev?” Elias asked. The spiky ball Narev had dropped at his feet was unlike anything he had ever seen. He was not even sure whether it was a fish or something else.
Still dripping water everywhere, Narev poked the sphere with his front foreleg, hard.
The sphere uncurled.
“Oh. Gross!” Elias said, taking a step back involuntarily.
Narev projected confusion, but Elias did not think he could approach the thing the wurl had hunted. It had to be an overgrown crustacean of some kind, like a gigantic shrimp with dozens upon dozens of short articulated legs that hung limp in the light of the noonday sun. The center of the creature had been cleanly speared by a silver spine, and only when he made certain that the thing was really dead did Elias approach again, gingerly.
“What in the generation ship is that?” Tristan asked from nearby. He sounded as disgusted as Elias felt.
“Some kind of copepod analog,” Elias answered, still unwilling to touch the animal.
“Some kind of what?”
“A crustacean, like a Terran lobster. But I didn’t know it was possible for crustaceans this big to exist.”
Again, Narev projected contentment. Elias received a faint mental image of Narev scouring the bottom of the sea, looking for the tasty creatures that he had only tasted once before in his life.
“So this is a treat, huh?” Elias asked the large wurl, placing his hand on Narev’s forehead. Through the contact, as usual, his perceptions of Narev’s experiences sharpened, and he was able to see clearly how the wurl had killed and eaten one of the crustaceans underwater, spending some time afterward trying to find another one to bring back up. It had been difficult, but he had managed, even shooing Siv away from his kill.
“A treat?” Tristan echoed.
“I think wurl love eating this animal. Narev got one for us to share.”
“Uh… okay. Thanks?”
The seemingly dead creature twitched, and both Elias and Tristan flinched. Narev grunted, confused.
“Thank you, Narev,” Elias told him. “I’m going to try to cook this somehow.”
“Good luck with that,” Tristan told him. “I can’t eat animals, and I’m not going to start with this thing. I’ll stick to the rations if that’s okay with you.”
“Yeah. Of course. I’ll eat whatever Narev brings me. You eat the other food we carry.”
Tristan proceeded to sit down and enjoy a package of dried food that he claimed was lentil curry, while Elias was left with the alien-looking giant shrimp.
“I’m not even going to give it a name,” he grumbled, reaching for a knife.
He spent the next hour essentially dissecting the animal, trying to find which parts he could eat. It was not pleasant work, but at the end of it, he had managed to pry open the surprisingly tough exoskeleton of the creature to expose white, glistening meat that appeared to be moist and supple.
Narev was still standing next to him, mentally urging him to take a bite.
“Okay,” Elias mumbled. “Here goes nothing.”
He carved out a piece of the meat, closed his eyes, and put it in his mouth.
It was tart, tough, and a little bit slimy, but not as bad as he had expected. It had ample moisture, and the savory juice filled his mouth as he chewed. The flavor reminded him of breaded shrimp sticks he’d had back home, when there had still been some, but mixed in the seafood tang there was a hint of spice to it, which was not altogether unpleasant.
“How is it?” Tristan wanted to know.
Elias swallowed. He shrugged. “I think I could get used to it.”
“Good. I’m going to eat over there if you don’t mind. Far away from this, uh, thing.”
After eating as much as he could, Elias set aside a few more pieces of meat for dinner and gave the rest of the creature to Narev, who happily devoured it in three bites.
“I think we should check out the ocean maw from beneath,” Tristan suggested after they were done. “You know, to make sure it’s dead.”
“Yeah. Good idea.”
The two of them stripped down to their underwear and jumped into the ocean. The water was warm, and Elias was reassured when Vanor decided to jump in with them and hang out nearby.
“Do we dive down?” Elias asked.
“Yeah. Let’s see what we can see.”
Elias took a big breath and then plunged his head into the water. He used both hands and feet to go farther down and then opened his eyes, fighting against the sting of the salt. As quickly as he could, he took stock of what he could see.
He had imagined the ocean maw to be a large organism, but it appeared to be quite flat, even from beneath. Kicking hard with his legs, Elias swam beneath the platform as far as he was able to go and saw only kelp strands, or something that looked quite similar to it, hanging from the underside of the dead maw. There were no roots extending down into the water, no main stalk. The maw was like a giant lily pad, wide but not very thick, with the exception of three strange dark growths near the center of the platform which appeared to be big enough to each contain two wurl side by side.
Elias’s lungs demanded oxygen, and he swam away until he was able to come up to the surface for air. Sputtering, he waited for Tristan to come up.
“Anything?” Tristan asked him.
“It’s dead,” Elias reported.
“Did you see the things near the center?”
“Yeah. I’m guessing that would be the stomach.”
“Is it a threat, do you think?”
“No,” Elias said confidently. “The plant won’t be trying to eat any of us anymore.”
“Okay. Good.”
Elias followed Tristan back onto the platform. Together, they checked the progress of their condenser, which had captured enough moisture out of the air to fill about a fifth of a drinking glass of water.
“Not much,” Tristan observed.
“I know.”
The rest of the day went by uneventfully, although Elias had a mild sunburn after being all day out in the open. He slept as fitfully that night as the night before, and he was tired the next morning.
There followed several days that blurred together in their monotony. Elias tried to do as Tristan instructed, sticking to a routine to help while away the minutes, but it was hard. There was almost nothing to do other than read the occasional message from Portree. In the mornings he would eat whatever fish or strange creature Narev brought for him, and that was the high point of the day. Afterward, as the merciless sun climbed ever higher in the sky, he and Tristan would sometimes simply lie next to one of the wurl, sheltering from the heat in the shade they provided, using their own clothing or the empty backpacks to cover their faces or their heads and trying to escape the ever-present danger of heat stroke.
In the early afternoon they would swim for a bit, but as their food reserves dwindled, it became clear that spending energy in frivolous activities was out of the question. Elias was very worried about what they would do once the dried food ran out. He knew he would not starve—Narev would not allow it. However, Elias had no idea how they would get food for Tristan if they were unable to find a vegetable source of nourishment.
Far more urgent than the food was the water, a constant reminder of their perilous situation. They had rationed it, but on the fourth day of their aimless drifting at sea, it ran out. They were left with the condenser only, but it produced less than two full glasses per day, and it was simply not enough for two men.
Elias favored Tristan once again, arguing that he could get some moisture from the flesh of the animals that Narev brought to him, which was true. Tristan had resisted at the beginning, but on the fifth day he finally gave in and drank most of the water himself. Elias was parched, but he did not say anything. He knew that their resources were stretched to the limit now, and they would need to find a way to keep going if they wanted to live.
Elias began dreading the sunrise, because with it came heat and thirst. It was maddening to be surrounded by water that he could not drink, and during the hottest hours of the day, both Tristan and he would lie quietly, scarcely talking, each second dragging on like an hour. Elias took to looking at his link every few minutes, staring at the estimate of the distance they had crossed. It was pitiful. Whatever ocean current was dragging them along only took them about forty kilometers per day, due east. They needed to cross thousands of kilometers to get to Raasay.
Irritability began to thread its insidious tendrils into everyday interactions. At first it was little things, like deciding whose turn it was to check on the condenser and make sure it hadn’t turned over. As the days went by, though, Elias found that many more things made his temper flare. It could be the heat, or finding that Tristan had sat down on his spot in the shade next to the wurl. It was also watching him eat the last few remnants of their dried food while Elias was reduced to eating raw fish that he had long since stopped being disgusted by, but which was by no means enjoyable.
At night Elias began to wake up with every little noise. If Tristan got up in the night to pee overboard, Elias woke up and resented him for it. If one of the wurl tossed in his sleep, Elias would grit his teeth and try to find release in his own dreams, often unsuccessfully. When he did fall asleep, the nightmares from the battle reared their ugly heads as if they had been waiting for him to let his guard down.
The mornings brought no relief. On the seventh day, near noon, he realized his entire body ached. He was tired, thirsty, and bored out of his mind.
He took out his link and made the same calculation he had already made several dozen times over.
“At the rate we’re going,” he said weakly, lying next to Tristan in the shade of Siv’s body, “It’s going to take seventy days to reach the coast. That’s seventy full days. Two months.”
“Hmmm,” Tristan grunted noncommittally.
“And that’s if the currents don’t change.”
“Hmmm.”
“And if we don’t run into any other storms. There’s no way the water will last us that long, or the food. To say nothing of more Singers or Flyers. If they attack us, we have no defense.”
“Hmmm.”
“Also, assuming we don’t—”
“Stop that, Elias,” Tristan snapped, his voice sharper than Elias had ever heard it.
“What?” Elias retorted, hurt.
“Listing every single way we’re completely screwed. I know we are, okay? I don’t need to hear it every single day.”
“Sorry for being informative,” Elias spat back.
“That’s not being informative. That’s being negative.”
“Oh, so it’s negative to be realistic about our situation?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t have to deal with this,” Elias huffed. He sat up quickly, and his head spun for a minute from the motion, compounded by his exhaustion. When he recovered, he walked over to Narev and sat next to him to sulk.
“That’s right, run away from a proper discussion or admitting you were wrong,” Tristan called.
“Leave me alone, Tristan.”
“Fine,” Tristan replied sarcastically.
“Fine.”
The remainder of the day crawled miserably by in an uncomfortable silence. When his thirst got too bad that afternoon, Elias went for a quick dip in the ocean water, but it was torture. He climbed back onto the platform, wondering if he should attempt to eat the kelp that still clung to the ocean maw or if that would be suicide. He had no idea whether the tissues of the kelp would be saturated with salt or not.
He sat with his feet over the edge of the platform and wondered where the wurl were. They had dived into the ocean around noon and had yet to return. He had eaten part of a fish Narev had brought him in the morning, but the meat had been tough and difficult to swallow. In fact, now that he thought about it, he wondered whether eating it had been a mistake. If he remembered correctly from his physiology textbook, digestion used up a lot of water.
An electronic beep jolted him into full alertness. He turned to face the center of the platform, where the condenser was notifying them that it had finished producing five hundred milliliters of water.
The water was there. Right there, in its transparent little container. Elias looked at it, and then at Tristan, who had stood up and was walking to the container to retrieve the precious liquid.
The two of them locked eyes for a moment. They hadn’t spoken at all since the fight in the morning.
Elias looked away and tried to think of something that was not water. He was scared, lonely, and really thirsty. He began to think that it had been a mistake to embark on a quest halfway across the world he did not know, completely unprepared, trusting blind luck.
I’m sorry, Oscar, he thought to himself. I don’t know if I’m going to make it.
He heard Tristan approach behind him. Elias stiffened and did not look at Tristan as he sat down next to him with a sigh. A torturous slosh of liquid in a bottle was all-too easily audible in the quiet of late afternoon.
“Here,” Tristan said.
